Felting A Tiny Bunny For The Dollhouse

Every night I’ve been working on my dollhouse furniture project but I’m doing it in a lot of mini stages so although I’d really like to, I’m not quite ready to write about it just yet.

Instead I’ll show you how I sculpted a tiny felted bunny for the dollhouse set this morning.

It took me about an hour to make the tiny bun bun but that was also while balancing my daughter’s lunch time/cuddle time/diaper changes.

Materials:

White wool

Pink wool

Black wool

Felting needle (I used a 38 gauge)

Felting mat

Scissors

I started with the body. If you’ve never experimented with needle felting before you’re basically just stabbing a fluffy tuft of wool into a solid lump with the felting needle.

The first thing you need to do is grab a fluffy tuft of wool and roll it into an oval shape, then stab it and rotate it until you’ve got something that resembles a firm cocoon. Resist the temtation to trim away any fluffy strands of wool that are sticking out. These fluffy bits on the body and the body parts are what are going to knit the whole thing together. Once the bunny is 100% assembled you can give him a hair cut if you feel you need to.

Next define the head and body by creating a neck. This is done by more repeated stabbing and rotating until you’re happy with the shape.

Then once you’ve got the body you can make limbs. You make these exactly the same way you made the body cocoon, just smaller. I made 4 the same size, then two ears which were similar in size but flatter and a little ball for the tail.

Once I made the ear shapes I just applied (stabbed) a tiny bit of pink wool onto the fronts.

Once all body parts are formed you can felt them into the body. I did it in the order of legs, arms, tail, ears. It’s important to do the ears last because they’re the most fiddly and likely to fall off.

To fix the body parts on you just stab them into the body. You have to be really careful because this is when you’re most likely to stab yourself since the bunny is so tiny. I fixed the parts on by laying the body on the felting mat and very carefully pushing the needle through the limbs and into the body at an angle.

After the body parts are on you may need to do some additional sculpting to define them.

I also added the little pink nose at this stage.

Make sure you’re happy with how the whole bunny is sculpted before you add (stab) in the eyes. Stray black strands can be a real pain in the neck if they come into contact with a white bunny while you’re still sculpting.

Lastly you can very carefully snip away any fluffy bits that you don’t want. I like left this bunny quite fuzzy to give the impression that he’s a tiny stuffed toy :D